Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(43)

He approached a muscular bouncer at the door, whose name tag said MANGE.

“Unsavories only,” Mange said sternly.

“What, don’t I look unsavory to you?”

He shrugged. “There are always poseurs.”

Greyson showed him his ID, which flashed the big red U. The bouncer was satisfied. “Enjoy,” he said mirthlessly, and let him in.

He assumed he’d be walking into a place with loud music, flashing lights, gyrating bodies, and dark corners where all sorts of questionable things would be going on. But what he found inside Mault was not at all what he expected—in fact, he was so unprepared for what he saw that he stopped short, as if maybe he had stepped through the wrong door.

He was in a brightly lit restaurant—an old-fashioned malt shop with red booths and shiny stainless-steel stools at the counter. There were clean-cut guys wearing varsity letter jackets, and pretty ponytailed girls in long skirts and thick, fuzzy socks. Greyson recognized the era that the place was intended to reflect: a time period called The Fifties. It was a cultural epoch from mortal-age Merica, where all the girls had names like Betty and Peggy and Mary Jane, and all the guys were Billy or Johnnie or Ace. A teacher once told Greyson that The Fifties was, in fact, only a period of ten years, but Greyson found it hard to believe. It was probably at least a hundred.

The place seemed a loyal replica of the era, but there was something off about it—because sprinkled among the clean-cuts were unsavories who did not belong in the scene at all. One unsavory with intentionally tattered clothes forced himself into a booth with a happy couple.

“Get lost,” he told the strong-looking All-Merican Billy in a letter sweater who sat across from him. “Your girl and I are gonna get acquainted.”

The Billy, of course, refused to leave, and threatened to take the unsavory and “knock him into next Tuesday.” ?The unsavory responded by getting up, dragging the jock out of the booth, and starting a fight. The big guy had everything over the scrawny unsavory: size and strength, not to mention looks, but every time the jock swung his heavy fists, they missed, while the unsavory connected every time—until finally the jock ran off, wailing in pain, abandoning his girlfriend, who now seemed quite impressed by the unsavory’s bravado. He sat down with her, and she leaned in to him as if they were the true couple.

At another table, an unsavory girl got into an insult match with a pretty debutante in a pink sweater. The confrontation ended with the unsavory girl grabbing her sweater and ripping it. The pretty girl didn’t fight back; she just put her face in her hands and sobbed.

And in the back, some other Billy was moaning because he had just lost all of Daddy’s money in a billiards wager to a merciless unsavory who would not stop insulting him.

What the hell was going on here?

Greyson sat down at the counter, wishing he could just disappear into the black hole of his hair until he could get a grip on the various dramas playing out around him.

“What’s your pleasure?” asked a perky waitress behind the counter. Her uniform had the name “Babs” embroidered on it.

“A vanilla shake, please,” he said. Because isn’t that what you ordered in a place like this?

The waitress smirked. “The P word,” she said. “Don’t hear that much around here.”

Babs brought his shake, inserted a straw, and said, “Enjoy.”

In spite of Greyson’s desire to disappear, another unsavory sat next to him. A guy who was so gaunt he was practically skeletal.

“Vanilla? Really?” he said.

Greyson dug inside himself to find some appropriate attitude. “You got a problem with it? Maybe I should just throw it at you and get another.”

“Naah,” said skeletor. “It’s not me you’re supposed to throw it at.”

The guy winked at him—and then it finally clicked. The nature of this place—its purpose—became clear to Greyson. Skeletor watched him to see what he would do, and Greyson realized that if he was going to fit in—truly fit in—he had to own this. So he called Babs over.

“Hey,” he said, “my shake sucks.”

Babs put her hands on her hips. “So what do you want me to do about it?”

Greyson reached for his shake. He was just going to knock it over and dump it onto the counter, but before he could, skeletor grabbed it off the table and hurled its contents at Babs, leaving her dripping with vanilla cream and a maraschino cherry lodged in the breast pocket of her uniform.

“He said his shake sucks,” said skeletor. “Make him another!”

Babs, her uniform dripping with vanilla, sighed and said, “Coming right up.”? Then she went off to make him a new shake.

“That’s the way it’s done,” said the unsavory. He introduced himself as Zax. He was a little older than Greyson—perhaps twenty-one—but had a way about him that suggested this wasn’t his first time at that age.

“Haven’t seen you around,” he said.

“The Authority Interface sent me here from up north,” Greyson told him, amazed that he could make up a story on the spot. “I was causing too much trouble, so the Thunderhead felt I could do with a fresh start.”

“A new place to make trouble,” said Zax. “Nice.”

“This club is different from the ones they got where I come from,” Greyson said.